Is Gopher still in use? I only tested it a few times back in 1995/96 😐

Yes it does, although it's vestigial at this point.

gdjacobs wrote:

Yes it does, although it's vestigial at this point.

When I counted few years ago, there was about 100 surviving gopher servers left in the world. Recently I got curious again, so I created the Observable Gopherspace Universe Project (OGUP) at [url]gopher://gopher.viste.fr/1/ogup[/url]

The OGUP robot navigates through Gopherspace and counts all active servers it encounters on its journey. So far, it counted over 300 of them, that is a 3x increase compared to few years ago.
I am telling you - the days of the WWW are over.

I have Netscape 8 (2005) installed so I can remotely manage one of my retro machines. It can also handle gopher. Do I need a newer client?

Today Gopherus v1.2 got published.

Gopherus v1.2 [19 Jan 2020]:
- [new] bookmarks ("b" key),
- [new] UTF-8 support,
- [new] IPv6 support (except on the DOS target),
- [new] full terminal width used now (no longer limited to 80 columns),
- [new] all files from current folder can be downloaded by pressing F10,
- [new] SDL versions have a resizeable (scalable) window,
- [new] SDL versions react to keypad arrows as well as normal arrows,
- [new] user may abort a connection during its 'connecting...' phase,
- [new] home page shortcut key (F2),
- [fix] fixed buffer overflow within menu lines parser,
- [fix] SDL UI does not enforce software rendering any more,
- [fix] improved pgup/pgdown keys logic in menus,
- [fix] wordwrapped menu entries are displayed in parent's colors,
- [fix] Windows sockets are properly closed (patch by Gisle Vanem),
- [fix] function keys react properly when used with the CURSES interface,
- [fix] telnet links are recognized now (but unsupported),
- [mnt] Windows build no longer distributed (do it yourself),
- [mnt] DOS 32-bit build no longer distributed (use the 16-bit version).

http://gopherus.sourceforge.net

...and yesterday I released a minor 1.2.1 revision that fixes a stability problem on the real-mode DOS build.

This project literally cries out for being ported to Win3 and PC/GEOS. 😎
(And if it's possible to use DOS network services, Win /386 & GEM, too. Due to the coolness factor.)

PS: This would be ideal for old glass terminals, as well, I could imagine. VT-52, VT-100 etc.
Maybe the code could be compacted somehow to run on an Arduino w/ ethernet shield ?
A basic serial port is already available on Arduino Uno boards.